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Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…if the Democrats are able to get this legislation. —Sen. John Ensign (R-Nevada) We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us. —Lee Scott, former Wal-Mart CEO I once worked professionally in the labor movement, and I often say that I have never felt the slightest discontinuity in moving from labor organizing and labor strategizing to ordained ministry. To me all of it has been the Lord’s work—and here is…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…possibility of women priests), sheds gay people from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world….

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…uld descend on Oakland for the sentencing to stand in solidarity with Hoye against “a deliberate attempt to silence the Church and its prophetic role in protecting the innocent lives in our community and especially Black babies.” In all, the small-potatoes case of Rev. Hoye is just another moment in the sun for increasingly vocal anti-abortion activists who claim to fight abortion on anti-racist grounds; they tar abortion and family planning servi…

‘Murder Among the Mormons,’ Latest True Crime Doc From Netflix, Highlights Issues of Faith, Skepticism, and Authenticity

By Benjamin E. Park

…the city of Salt Lake City, Utah, was shaken to its core. That morning, a fatal bomb exploded at the office of businessman Steven Christensen; that afternoon, another bomb claimed the life of Kathy Sheets, the wife of one of Christensen’s colleagues, at her suburban home. Many assumed the deaths were related to an investment deal gone sour. However, there was another link that seemed more provocative and immediately caught the national spotlight:…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…ight be dying. The movement’s putative founder, Rev. Jerry Falwell, passed away last year, and several other original movement leaders, especially Rev. Pat Robertson, are far less politically relevant today than they were in their heyday. We now hear comparatively little about religious right interest groups, and the once-powerful Christian Coalition is a brittle shell of its former self. Quite a few books recently have appeared that call for or p…

Religious Practices on Trial in Arizona: The Problem With “Experts”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…illion dollars, and as of Monday morning February 8, Ray was still in the Yavapai County jail. Since the October 8 incident that resulted in the deaths of three people in a Ray-led “Warrior Sweat,” Sheriff’s deputies have interviewed hundreds of witnesses in the investigation leading to the indictments. Dozens of participants were treated at area hospitals after the sweat lodge, and by the end of that fatal day Kirby Brown and James Shore were dea…

How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…tudy late last week looking how religious beliefs influence perceptions on a number of different issues. A quick-and-dirty look at the results would tell you that religion doesn’t change much, with a few notable exceptions. For example, this surprising statistic: “60% of those who oppose gay marriage say religion is the most important influence on their views.” One wonders where the other 40% comes from. Likewise, social issues come in dead last o…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…ed on my time in four different departments in nearly as many years, is an adapted version of Voltaire’s adage “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (It was S. G. Tallentyre writing about Voltaire in The Friends of Voltaire who actually said this, but no matter.) It is fundamentally a speech platform, personified in former-CEO Dick Costolo’s favorite description of the service as the “global town squa…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…d that “Jesus was white” on Monday the small corner of Twitter in which Metaxas is sometimes a conversation piece erupted quickly, and with wild speculation. Is he looking for attention? Being provocative? No one actually believes that Jesus is white, do they? Surely Metaxas is smart enough to know that this claim is easily refuted. But, it appears that he didn’t misspeak; he said what he meant to say. There are a few serious issues with this twee…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…damentalists and evangelicals. What made them most distinct, what set them apart from liberal Protestants is not what we’ve traditionally thought. It’s not questions of the virgin birth or how you read the Bible or questions of the nature of the incarnation or the literal resurrection of Jesus or Jesus’s miracles. All those matter, all of those things do set them apart, but they don’t affect how they live their daily lives. The one thing that affe…